The Israeli minister for tourism Rehavam Zeevi, who has been assassinated aged 75, was so rightwing that he barely remained within the outer perimeter of political acceptability. He advocated the "transfer by agreement" of 3.3m Palestinians from the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza to the 21 Arab nations of the region. This policy, he argued, would "cure a demographic ailment". Somewhat slyly, last February he reminded liberal detractors that it was the Labour party that had invented and carried out the first "transfer" of Arabs, in 1948.
There were moments, however, when Zeevi's rationalist mask slipped, as when he condemned Arabs working illegally in Israel this year as "lice" and "cancer". On various occasions he called George Bush senior an "anti-Semite and a liar"; Yasser Arafat a "viper" and "war criminal"; while former Labour prime minister Ehud Barak was plainly "insane".
Hours before being sworn in as tourism minister last March, he vowed to quell the Palestinians' second intifada by finding their "weak spots and pressing them until they come to us on all fours begging for a ceasefire". In April, Zeevi called on the military to destroy Arafat's house.
Unsentimental toughness was his hallmark, both as military governor of the West Bank in the 1970s, and as political leader in the 1980s and 1990s. As chief of the army's central command he kept a caged lion as his mascot. Paradoxically, Zeevi was due to resign as minister in the Sharon government, in protest at a partial Israeli army withdrawal in Hebron, on the very day he was ambushed - apparently by gunmen from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in retaliation for Israel's assassination of their own leader, Abu Ali Mustafa. (obituary, August 28). Zeevi's death was the first Arab assassination of an Israeli cabinet minister.
Born in Jerusalem in 1926, and raised on a collective farm, it was a scrawny teenage Zeevi that entered the Labour Zionists' elite Palmach unit. He fought in the 1948 war, served in the permanent force of the Israeli Army, and graduated from the US Army Command and General Staff College. After retiring as a major-general in 1974, he acted as security advisor to the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, for three years, and was widely respected for his military record.
Quite what turned the Labourite into the ultra-nationalist remains unclear. Israel's conquest of the West Bank and Gaza crystallised the hitherto moderate "national religious camp" into fierce advocacy for occupation and settlement. But although he saw the settlers as pioneers in the reclamation of biblically ordained "Eretz Yisrael", he was not a particularly observant Jew.
Perhaps strategic considerations, or memories of past weakness, forged his views. To Zeevi, any talk of evacuating the 200,000-plus Jewish settlers of the territories was heresy against the basic tenets of Zionism.
In 1988 he led his Moledet (Homeland party) into the Knesset for the first time. Liberal critics saw it as the natural successor to the soon-to-be-banned racist Kach party. To the chagrin of Likud apparatchiks, Zeevi slipped into Yitzhak Shamir's government, thus throwing it a lifeline after Shimon Peres failed to torpedo it.
He served as minister from February 1991 till January 1992, resigning in protest at the Madrid peace talks, and thereby prompting the election that saw Labour return to power. Moledet retained three seats in 1992, went into opposition, and Zeevi returned briefly to shore up the beleagured Netanyahu government in 1998. In 1999 a joint front between the National Union (subsuming Moledet) and a Russian rightwing party yielded seven seats.
After Barak's defeat, Sharon led a much broader government of national unity, which after March 2001 included Zeevi. Labour abandoned its threat to boycott joining the coalition that it had said "served as a figleaf for such extremism". This month, it was the National Union which jumped ship, citing Sharon's agreement to a Palestinian state, and the alleged "sabotaging" of the Israeli military.
Some smirked at Zeevi being offered the tourism portfolio. Few international counterparts agreed to meet him. Even so, he was uniquely qualified for the post. As one of Israel's greatest authorities on biblical history and geography, he helped publish 65 books, led tours, translated English tomes on travel to 19th-century Palestine, and boasted one of the finest collection of Bibles and old volumes in Israel. For a decade he oversaw and revived Tel Aviv's highly esteemed Land Of Israel folkloric museum.
He spoke fluent Arabic and English, and his brusque exterior hid a mordant sense of humour. Loyal by nature, he always wore dog tags to remind him of soldiers missing in action.
He is survived by his widow, Yael, and five children.
· Rehavam Zeevi, soldier and politician, born June 20 1926; died October 17 2001